A superiority and inferiority ranking model for contractor selection

Contractor selection is carried out in order to choose a competent and capable contractor to do the work. To help in this selection, baselines are established to ensure that the contractors have the required skills, resources, and abilities to execute the project. Contractor selection is a multiple criteria decision making wherein several criteria are required to be evaluated simultaneously. This paper aims to propose a decision-making model. The proposed model utilizes superiority and inferiority ranking (SIR) method and it provides six preference structures in order to compare the performance of alternatives' criteria. As such, it can represent discrete or continuous criteria. The preference structures utilize indifference and preference thresholds to capture the characteristics of functions that represent the specified criteria. The model provides two aggregation procedures (simple additive weighting and technique for order preference by similarity to the ideal solution) to generate superiority and inferiority flows. The proposed model is generic and can be used as a tool to evaluate alternatives in several applications such as value engineering, optimum organization structure, and constructability analysis. It enables its users to define the criteria that are deemed important for evaluation. The proposed multiple criteria decision making (SIR method) is novel to construction. This ranking method can be utilized as a successful tool in contractor selection problem.